A Chinese luxury electric car maker has deployed humanoid robots in its factories for the first time in a blow to Elon Musk’s efforts to make Tesla a global leader in the technology.
Zeekr, which is owned by Chinese automotive giant Geely, has begun experimenting with the “Walker S Lite” robot, which resembles a human and can perform basic tasks.
A slick video on social media shows the two-legged robot, made by Shenzhen-based UBtech Robotics, moving boxes around the carmaker’s “intelligent factory” in China’s Hangzhou Bay region.
The robot is shown loading small pallets onto a conveyor below, which UBtech said it had done for 21 consecutive days, showing how it can assist “employees with logistics works”.
When welcomed to the Zeekr factory by an employee, the robot replies “I will do my best”, before it is seen carrying boxes weighing as much as 15kg across the factory, walking in a human-like manner.
Alongside Zeekr, Geely controls British brand Lotus and has a stake in Aston Martin. It also owns the London EV Company, which manufactures London’s iconic black cabs.
The footage from its factory comes a month after billionaire Mr Musk said Tesla would begin producing and using humanoid robots from 2025.
“Tesla will have genuinely useful humanoid robots in low production for Tesla internal use next year and, hopefully, high production for other companies in 2026,” Mr Musk recently wrote on X.
The Tesla chief executive has previously said the number of two-legged robots on Earth would one day surpass the 8bn humans on the planet.
He first announced plans to produce a 170cm-tall droid designed to do “boring, repetitious and dangerous” work in 2021.
In December, Tesla debuted a new version of its humanoid robot that could squat without falling over and pick up an egg without breaking it.
The “Optimus Gen 2” could walk 30pc faster, was 10kg lighter and had improved balance and hand movements compared to its previous model, Tesla said.
Tesla has long worked on autonomous and robotics technology, automating its warehouses and deploying self-driving car software in its electric vehicles.
However, Optimus is not the only humanoid robot making rapid progress.
In February, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, trained a two-legged robot to walk around San Francisco.
UBtech also posted a video in February showing its Walker S robot working on an assembly line at a factory run by Nio, the Chinese car manufacturer.
UBtech, Zeekr and Tesla were contacted for comment.
Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.
